Editors From The United States

"The ultimate cost reduction is eliminating atoms entirely and dealing only in bits."

"Broadly, the Long Tail is about abundance. Abundant shelf space, abundant distribution, abundant choice."

"Talent is not universal but it is widely spread: Give enough people the capacity to create, and inevitably gems will emerge."

"Never underestimate the power of a million amateurs with keys to the factory."

"Remember, in the tyranny of physical space, an audience too thinly spread is the same as no audience at all."

"The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers."

"Blockbusters are the exception, not the rule, and yet we see an entire industry through their rarefied air."

"We are entering an era of unprecedented choice. And that’s a good thing."

"Order it wrong and choice is oppressive; order it right and it’s liberating."

"In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distributions, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare."

"A Long Tail is just culture unfiltered by economic scarcity."

"Our growing affluence has allowed us to shift from being bargain shoppers buying branded (or even unbranded) commodities to becoming mini-connoisseurs, flexing our taste with a thousand little indulgences that sets us apart from others."

"For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability."

"The world of shelf space is a zero-sum game: One product displaces another."

"We are turning from a mass market back into a niche nation, defined now not by our geography but by our interests."

"This is the end of spoon-fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions, and the rise of messy mosaics of information that require—and reward—investigation."

"Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions."

"The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes—to me a beatitude—is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women—or men—can suffer is to be bereft of their past."

"People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal."

"We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies."

"Within our family there was no such thing as a person who did not matter. Second cousins thrice removed mattered."

"If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it."

"All fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction."

"I was also looking for poems that didn't simply reproduce familiar versions of "difference" and "identity." I agree with Charles Bernstein, poet-critic and exponent of L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry, when he remarks in A Poetics that "difference" too often appears in poems simply as "subject matter and ... local color" rather than as "form and content understood as an interlocking figure the one inaudible with-the other." Indeed, there are legions of columnar poems in which the anecdote of an ethnic parent or grandparent is rehearsed in a generic voice and format, whatever the cultural setting. I was glad to find poems by Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, Kimiko Hahn, C. S. Giscombe and Wanda Coleman, among others, that embody dialectics of "otherness" in language itself, the strange and familiar interpenetrating."

"In the America where I'm writing now, suffering is diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe familial, and at most to be "shared" with a group specific to the suffering, in the hope of "recovery." We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as communal and public, or as deriving from "skewed social relations" (Charles Bernstein)."

"Not for all the fire in hell Not for all the blue in the sky Not for an empire of my own Not even for peace of mind"

"Recently, I read an essay by Charles Bernstein criticizing a facile multiculturalism that can "have the effect of transforming unresolved ideological divisions and antagonisms into packaged tours of... local color of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, region, class. . . . In this context, diversity can be a way of restoring a highly idealized conception of a unified American culture that effectively quiets dissent." Many of us, I think, have had our doubts about such a "multiculturalism" or "diversity," or symbolic "inclusion," when the real question in our radically unequal society is power and privilege...Charles Bernstein, again, has called our public space "befouled" by "spectacularly inequitable distributions of power." In this "befouled" public sphere poetry cannot hope to lend itself to social change through conventional or contaminated methods of communication. Language, the medium, "autonomous and self-sufficient," must do its work by its own methods. I am, of necessity, abbreviating and simplifying here...The public space is indeed befouled. But I also think that Bernstein and others are right when they imply that threadbare language, frozen metaphors, poems in which we "cling to / what we've grasped too well" are part of the problem, and that the power of a poem to subvert, to "intensify / our relationships" depends on its being poetry-taking on the medium of language with all its difficulties. Difficulties of relationship and strangeness, of truth-telling and torsion and how the netted bridge is to be suspended over the gorge."

"Poetry will never win the war on terror But neither will error abetted by error We girly men are not afraid Of uncertainty or reason or interdependence We think before we fight, then think some more Proclaim our faith in listening, in art, in compromise So be a girly man & sing this gurly song Sissies & proud That we would never lie our way to war"

"tire swift swept front ly and lie and lane against"

"she had then could cram had by she am"

"The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. [...] Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off."

"As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really.""

"My other car is a bright green city."

"The answer to the problem of the American car is not under its hood. ...The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car but to eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go."

"Our goal should be to cool the planet in ways that reinforce and restore the resilience of its natural systems."

"We can freely acknowledge the tremendous struggle ahead of us, and yet choose to remain decidedly optimistic, and to work from a fundamental belief in the possibilities of the future. … Every time we explain how a better future might be built, we redraw the boundaries of the possible."

"We have to develop a model of prosperity that 4.5 billion more people can share and we don't know how to do it."

"To be young and aware is to suspect that, in the end, the debate about climate action isn’t about substance, but about rich old men trying to squeeze every last dollar, euro, and yen from their investments in outdated industries. It is to agree with the environmentalist Paul Hawken that we have an economy that steals the future, sells it in the present, and calls it GDP. It is to begin to see your elders as cannibals with golf clubs."

"Any future which is not beautiful is unacceptable."

"No future can be beautiful which involves an economy that violates the rights of future generations, that degrades fundamental planetary systems in any way, or that fails to offer every human being a basic share of safety, dignity and happiness."

"Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?"

"The future starts now."

"Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience."

"I’m not saying it was all for the best. (That’s one of the great stupid phrases of all time, imho.)"

"I think that a speculative literature from a culture that has been on the receiving end of the colonization glorified in some SF could be a compelling body of writing. Look at the work of the Jewish speculative fiction writers, like Jane Yolen's novel Briar Rose, which uses the elements of the folktale as a lens into the horrors of the Holocaust, and never once allows readers to romanticize the experience. It's brilliant."

"We had more church after supper, with a long sermon from Reverend Beelson. He talked about wars and earthquakes and floods as signs that the End was coming. Which made me wonder if he had somehow managed to not notice that wars, earthquakes, and floods have been going on since the beginning of history. But I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t worth the effort."

"The thing about signs from God is that you can never be sure. In the morning, going to the Porta Potti, I saw a deer. There was also a dead pigeon being a smorgas-bird for crows near the perimeter when I went with a message for an Angel. And the shed skin of some small snake that Grahame had collected. If those were signs, what did they mean? God loved me? God hated me? God didn’t care?… I saw more signs than I can remember. The moon was still shining like a pale penny at noon. There was an eagle wheeling overhead at four. A pair of bluejays squabbled in a fir tree when I came out of the Place of Eating after dinner. God was saying yes? God was saying no? God wasn’t speaking at all?"

"But you know how it is: As soon as you decide to forget something, your brain comes to the conclusion that it’s the most fascinating thing in the world."

"I took a deep breath. God…I prayed. And then I realize that I had nothing more to say to him. Nothing at all."

"“Dad, everyone knows Beelson is a nutcase! You should hear the things they say about him in school.” My father looked at me sadly. “I thought you didn’t believe in basing your life on what everyone else says, Mr. Nonconformist.” “OK, skip what everyone else says. I think he’s nuts.”"